Cloud Cost Engineer & Consultant (m/w/d)

As a Cloud Cost Engineer & Consultant at Cortex Reply, you'll build the platforms, pipelines, and automation that give enterprises real-time control over their technology spend. This is a hands-on engineering role at the intersection of infrastructure, automation, and financial analytics - turning raw billing data into actionable, automated optimisation. We work with the FinOps Foundation, shape industry standards, and expand the discipline into AI, sustainability, SaaS and beyond.

Your Tasks

Cost Visibility & Tooling Engineering

• Design integrations across AWS, Azure, and GCP billing APIs
• Architect data pipelines that normalise and unify multi-cloud, SaaS, and on-prem spend data
• Build dashboards, cost views, and real-time alerting using BI and observability tools

Automation & Policy Enforcement

• Design automated cost controls: policy-as-code guardrails (tagging, lifecycle, sizing), event-driven automation for idle resource cleanup and budget notifications
• Write reusable Terraform modules embedding cost-awareness into provisioning

Infrastructure Optimisation

• Generate rightsizing recommendations and remediate waste across cloud, SaaS, AI, and on-prem workloads
• Optimise Kubernetes workloads, storage tiers, network egress, and managed service configurations

Cost Allocation & Tagging Engineering

• Design and enforce tagging frameworks at scale
• Implement automated compliance checks and remediation workflows
• Build showback/chargeback systems mapping spend to business units, products, and teams

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with DevOps, Platform, and SRE teams to embed FinOps into existing workflows
• Enable engineering self-service through tools, APIs, and integrations that surface cost context
• Collaborate with finance to translate engineering data into business reporting

Thought Leadership

• Develop FinOps blueprints and playbooks
• Contribute trainings, talks, and publications
• Expand offerings into FinOps for AI, FinOps for SaaS, or sustainability tracking

Client Advisory & Consulting

• Act as a technical consultant to client teams - conduct assessments, lead workshops, and translate engineering solutions into business outcomes during client-facing engagements
• Contribute to solution design proposals and project scoping, ensuring technical feasibility aligns with client expectations and timelines

What We Offer

• Competitive compensation

• Professional development through challenging projects and training opportunities

• A diverse, international team with a strong knowledge-sharing culture

• Opportunities for thought leadership: conferences, publications, certifications

• A collaborative, supportive team environment

• Degree in Computer Science, IT, Engineering, or related field

• Proficiency in English and German (min. B2 each)

• Residence in Germany with work eligibility

• Willingness to travel occasionally

• Excellent communication skills for technical and non-technical audiences

• Understanding of agile frameworks and consulting experience

• Experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP)

• Python, Terraform, SQL

• Familiarity with cloud billing models, pricing structures, and usage metering

• Understanding of container-based architectures and Kubernetes basics

• Proactive, self-organised mindset

Nice to Have

• Cloud certifications or FinOps Practitioner certification
• Familiarity with cloud cost management tools (e.g. Cloudability, Flexera, Kubecost, Infracost)
• Exposure to SaaS management, on-prem licence optimisation, or AI cost management
• Automation/orchestration tools: n8n, Step Functions, Cloud Workflows
• Observability platforms: Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch
• BI tools: Power BI, Looker, Grafana dashboards
• AI/ML workload cost management (GPU economics, training vs. inference spend)
• SaaS licensing optimisation or on-prem infrastructure cost modelling